What is good is that Riverdance, for all its Busby Berkeley-style choreography and castardised music, is inspiring a new generation to try the real thing, if only to provide hoof-fodder for the inumerable spin-off shows - witness this from the London Evening Standard:

DATE: 8 Dec 99 BYLINE RONAN MCGREEVY HEAD Irish river of dance keeps profits flowing TO PAST generations, it was as deeply unfashionable as Morris Dancing - a pastime confined to draughty civic halls in the suburbs of north London. This month, however, with the launch of two more shows in London, Irish dancing has become both sexy and lucrative. Dancing On Dangerous Ground, created by former Riverdance stars Colin Dunne and Jean Butler, opened this week at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, while next Wednesday, Spirit Of The Dance opens at Wembley. Behind them all, of course, is the all-singing, all-dancing milch cow known as Riverdance. When Riverdance returns to its Dublin home next summer, it will have clocked up a global live audience of nine million. The show's publicists estimate another 1.2 billion - a quarter of the world's population - will have seen it on television or video. Even allowing for the hype, Riverdance has made its creators, husband and wife producers John McColgan and Moya Docherty, very wealthy. The couple mortgaged their house to pay for the first Riverdance - The Show, which opened in London in May 1995. Then, Docherty was earning about £35,000 as a producer with RTE. Last year, she was estimated to have a personal fortune of £31 million and she now owns 99 per cent of Abhann Productions, the company which created Riverdance. The couple recently sold their County Meath home and are building a mansion on four and a half acres overlooking Dublin Bay. Riverdance generates more than £100 million in revenue every year. Its three troupes, Liffey, Lagan and Lee, named after Irish rivers, are booked up until 2002 at the earliest. Irish dancing's first superstar Michael Flatley was the 25th highest paid entertainer in the world two years ago, with earnings of £33 million, according to Forbes Magazine. His exit from Riverdance in October 1995 turned out to be a financial stroke of luck. His subsequent stage creation, Lord Of The Dance, now has three troupes performing around the world and a new show, Feet Of Flames, starts in Germany in March. Meanwhile, the interest in Irish dancing shows no sign of slackening; neither does the bizarre proliferation of dance troupes seeking to cash in on the phenomenon. Like so many mutating centipedes, there are at least eight other shows of comparable size to Riverdance at present on tour around the world. Here in London, where the phenomenon took shape, Irish dancing has exploded from a terminally unfashionable preserve of Irish country girls with ruddy faces and thick ankles to something that can be thought of as "cool". Ten years ago there were about 25 Irish dancing schools in London. Today, there are at least 97. With so many shows on tour, a good dancer can command between £500 and £600 a week on tour and many of them have already signed for the two new shows in London. Dancing On Dangerous Ground's Jean Butler, 28, with her flowing red hair and lissom figure, made Irish dancing something most observers thought it could never be - sexy. The pair had little difficulty in securing the backing of promoter Harvey Goldsmith before his well-publicised financial difficulties. Costing £1.5 million, Dancing On Dangerous Ground is a creative gamble. Unlike other Irish dancing shows, it seeks to tell a conventional story in a conventional way - in this case the old Celtic myth of Diarmuid and Grainne. Though it made her a star, Butler believes Riverdance has questionable artistic merit. She says Dancing On Dangerous Ground is different. A show with less lofty artistic ambitions is Spirit Of The Dance. Its instigator, Yorkshireman David King, spotted an unparalleled opportunity when Riverdance opened. "Everybody I asked told me it would not last," he said. "But I knew there was a desperate need in the provinces for a show like Riverdance when the original was based in London." Spirit Of The Dance opened to a full house at the Bristol Palladium in September 1996. There are now six troupes performing around the world and the show's base is in Reno, Nevada. Mr King is hoping the Wembley Hall show will attract 5,000 people a day for its three-and-a-half week run.